


Side Stories for the Deep Dream Series

by DarkPhoenixLady



Series: The Deep Dream [5]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Side Story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:28:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27556879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkPhoenixLady/pseuds/DarkPhoenixLady
Summary: This will contain stories that flesh out the world of the Deep Dream
Series: The Deep Dream [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1995562
Kudos: 1





	1. St Mungo’s discovers packing peanuts

# St Mungo’s discovers packing peanuts

Gosling absently walked into the staff room to grab a butterbeer and have a 5 minute break while reading a patients notes. She stopped abruptly as a wall of slightly green nuggets was dominating the room, covering most of the chairs and part of the counter. It was held back by a thin transparent material that looked to be formed into a bag. Attached to the bag was a note addressed to Andromeda.

_Andromeda_

_We had a delivery to the office a few days ago and it came with packing peanuts. That made us think about your packing problem and so we figured that we’d buy you some so you could try it with a transfigured copy, and see if they would work. We called our office supplier and ordered you some. We estimated the weight of your pensive at around 30KG, so I hope that’s ok. We’ve told Soopy deliver them once they’ve been dropped of at our home and leave this note with them._

_Dan and Emma_

Using a small cutting charm, she made an opening in the bag and pulled out a couple of the packing peanuts. They didn’t really look like peanuts, so she walked off to find Andromeda with a handful.

“Andromeda, are you busy?”

“No, I can take a couple of minutes. What do you need.”

“A Dan and Emma delivered a lot of these for you, they’re in the staffroom.”

“OK, thanks, I’ll take the bag to my office during lunch.”

“Isn’t your office only just big enough for your desk, filing cabinet and a chair?”

“It is, why?”

“They’re taking up most of the staffroom.”

“I have got to see this.”

They both walked back to the staffroom to find a drift of packing peanuts flowing out of the door, signs that people had walked past and spread them out down the corridor evident in the trails of peanuts leading to the wards.

“How did you take the peanuts that you bought to me?”

“Oh, I used a small cutting charm to make a hole and took some out.”

“Did you repair the hole before you left?”

“No? Why would I, the material looked quite sturdy.”

“It’s likely that it came in a plastic bag, and they’re very strong as long as they’re not broken, but if they’re damaged the tears spread very easily.”

“Oh”

One of the other healers rushed up to the staffroom.

“We need you in the children’s ward, we’ve got choking children.”

They hurried off to the ward and the problem was quickly resolved and the stray packing peanuts picked up so that children couldn’t try to eat them.

───────── ೋღ :hpdd: ღೋ─────────

Meanwhile at the staffroom

Master Dagworth is coming back from a particularly difficult operation and was looking forward to being able to sit down for half an hour while sipping a cup of tea. A slight squeak under his foot as he stepped on a packing peanut made him stop and look at the corridor. Pulling out his wand he cast a finite. When that did nothing he cast a couple more charms which showed nothing before calling for the house elves.

“Lopsy”

“Yes Master Daggy”

“Get the other elves and clean this up.”

“What should we do with it?”

“I don’t care, as long as I can have my cup of tea in the next 5 minutes.”

He then turned away to go and relieve himself. Lopsy calls in the other elves, and they set about cleaning it up. When they get into the staffroom they see the letter hanging limply off of the bag. Realising that it must be a delivery they stopped vanishing the peanuts and start putting them away in every available cupboard and box outside the staffroom, after they leave a large drift in the stock room.

───────── ೋღ :hpdd: ღೋ─────────

Over the next few weeks the healers all learnt to be careful about opening cupboards and boxes just in case there was a shower of packing peanuts.

It also turned out that while they weren’t suitable for a pensive as the moonstone was too fragile and the copy had a tendency to slip through the packing if the box was tilted and get chipped. They were ideal for some of the other layered runic items that were smaller and less prone to chipping.

In one memorable moment, Neville Longbottom was given a packing peanut instead of a sweet wrapper by Alice. The attending healer wasn’t sure where she got it from, but it made Neville’s day.


	2. Nicolas gets his stone back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Occurs after the meeting in b1Ch45

# Nicolas gets his stone back

Nicolas and his wife Perenelle were eating a simple breakfast with a news show playing quietly on the TV in the corner. A large eagle owl wearing a heavily enchanted leather harness, it landed on the back of one of their chairs, gripping just hard enough to steady itself without marking the wood. When Nicolas turned his attention to it, it lifted one of it’s claws so that he could remove the letter that was attached. As soon as the letter was removed it was gone.

Nicolas opened the letter and read the cover note before unfolding another letter. After reading it he started to laugh.

“Penny, you’ve got to read this.”

“You know I hate that name, I still don’t know how you got to it from Perenelle.”, she groused good naturedly as she took the note.

“Oh that’s good, do you know if we still have that old bestiary that was almost impossible to read when we first found it back in Berlin?”

Nicolas thinks for a moment, “I think I know the one you mean, I’ll just grab it. What grabbed your attention?”

He goes over to a trunk in the corner of the room and walks down inside his voice tailing off as he gets deeper.

“I’m not talking to you while you’re in the library.” She shouts down, an indecipherable response floats up the opening. A short while later he comes back up carrying an old tome.

“Here you go. What did you see in the letter.” She spends a couple of minutes finding the right entry and turns the book to him.

“There, I thought I’d see that word before.”

_ Aictuilaxr _

_A small creature native to the middle layers of the Dream. It looks like a small numbat with furry tentacles instead of a mouth and nose. It can natively see magic, and uses its tentacles to detect loose magic that is easy to scavenge. While it survives off of Magic, it likes to use matter to make its nests and will take suitable materials from its surroundings. When they manage to get to the real world they are considered to be a pest in magical communities because they will eat any spells or wards that aren’t anchored by runes. As such most people will never have seen one. As a defence against predators, it can only be seen with magical senses, creatures using non-magical senses will be hard pressed to even find one. Fortunately they need an environment with far more concentrated magic than can be found on Earth in order to breed, otherwise I fear that only the most learned would be able to use basic housekeeping enchantments leading us to need to coexist with non-magicals despite the growing Christian faith._

“Oh ho, someone’s been delving again. I wonder if it was accidental or deliberate.” He half laughed at his wife.

“I don’t know that it’s a good thing, do you remember what it was like back then?”

“I do, I do indeed, I also remember why it stopped a few hundred years ago.”

“There is that I suppose, what with all the aluminium and fiberglass spreading around now.”

“Doesn’t it make you wish we’d learnt how to do it when there were still experts around.”

“No thank you, I like knowing that I don’t stick out like a lit beacon to anything that decides to come and visit earth.”

“There is that. What do you think of the rest of the letter?”

“You mean about the decoy stone?”

“Yep” he deliberately pops the P, and then yelps as Perenelle pokes him in the ribs.

“I think we should wait to see what Albus does, and maybe give her the stone back as a souvenir.”

“It’s still quite a decent Alchemical catalyst.”

“True, maybe a couple of introductory books on Alchemy too?”

“I’ll also let her know that we’ll collect the mirror in the summer after school has let out. I wonder what mirror he’s used for this.”

“I’ve got no idea, what do you think he’s going to say when we ask for the stone back so we can make more elixir?”

“It had to be destroyed to stop someone else from getting it? That’s the usual one isn’t it?”

“It is, he was such a promising young lad. You know, it might actually be worth introducing ourselves to these people if they’ve got aictuilaxr.”

“Maybe in a few years, we can keep our ears open to see what sort of people they are.”

“I was actually thinking that we wouldn’t need to worry about them trying to steal the Elixir, as if they’ve successfully ventured to those levels they’re going to be more magic than human, so they wouldn’t need it.”

“I forgot about that, whatever happened to Beowolf?”

“I seem to remember he said he was going to explore the sea a few centuries ago.”

“That would explain why we’ve not seen him then.”

They continued their conversation as their cereal went soggy.


	3. Quibbler interview with Hogwarts

# Quibbler interview with Hogwarts

By Xenophilius

First of all, I would like to apologise for the sparse papers over the last few months. I have had the opportunity to live and train with the illustrious Hogwarts herself, visited occasionally by her Magically Adopted daughter Nicole. Before we get to the interview, I’d like to describe a few things about my life here. These are purely my opinion and as such may have no basis in fact.

Apart from books, the first thing that draws your attention is that despite it’s grand and airy architecture, it is very sparsely furnished. When I asked Hogwarts about the lack of Luxuries, she looked at me strangely and said, “That’s what magic is for.” The longer I stayed here and had to rely on my own magic, to an extent few of us do anymore, the more apparent the truth of that statement became. The second thing that became apparent was when she snapped my wand in front of me. I swear I almost had a heart attack when that happened. However, having now lived here for the entire Autumn term I can say that it was the right thing for her to do.

Let me make one thing clear, Hogwarts is truly old. When you’re around her it doesn’t seem possible because she’s so full of life and looks like she’s in her mid-twenties at the oldest. However, she is older than the Roman wand by at least a few centuries.

_Sidebar: What we call our wand is rightly called a Roman Wand. It was specifically designed to bypass the laborious process of learning to use magic and then being taught free form magic from your teacher, if you were lucky enough to have one._

This never becomes more apparent when you see the sense of loss that she expresses as she launches into a story from one of her memories. If anyone believes that being immortal is only full of good things keep this in mind. The other thing that makes you aware of her age is when she’ll say something about magic as an aside that makes you just stop and stare at her. I think the first time it happened to me was when she first told me that there’s no such thing as a spell. It took me a few weeks to understand that statement, underlying all magic that we do are two things, our will and our intent.

There seems to be some things that you can’t do with magic, but they all seem to be to do with our understanding of the world around us. When I asked her about Gamps law about being able to make good food, she just handed me a muggle guide to healthy eating. I’m sure that all of my readers will be as mystified about terms like Amino Acid, Vitamin, Minerals in the context of something in our food, and Calories. When I ignorantly asked what they were, she loaded me down with a pile of muggle books at least 2 feet high. At the top was a book called Textbook of Medical Physiology by Guyton & Hall, there were books on biology, chemistry, something called protein folding, and a couple more. She then said, “When you understand all of those you’ll be able to create good food with magic.”. The other thing that you quickly learn about her is that she is a hard taskmistress. I feel like the only times I had free were when her daughter visited, or a couple of hours every school day when she would spend a couple of hours meditating with the first-year students. Even this time wasn’t free, as I spent it editing the next issue of the Quibbler.

Before we get to the interview, the final impression you get is the one that leaves you constantly surprised. She is actually quite a small woman with simple tastes and a thirst for knowledge gained through bitter experience of being ignorant. When you think about her achievements and stories she’s this giant of a woman that has been to most continents and lived in most regions of the world for at least a short lifetime. Instead, she’s a short Greek woman with simple tastes. If she wasn’t bound to the castle I imagine that she wouldn’t look out of place on any street as she shops with her Daughter.

**Good Morning Hogwarts, I suppose the first question I have for you is. Is Hogwarts your name?  
** _Ed:She just laughed at the question before answering.  
_ It depends on what you mean by name. Is it the name I was born with? No, I don’t remember my birth name. Is it a name I earned? Sort of, technically according to Scottish law, before the unification of the kingdoms, I am the head of the Independent clan Hogwarts.

 **What is an Independent clan?  
** It is a title that was rarely given to an individual clan head that exempted the clan lands from the auspices of the Crown. It only ever applied to a single clan head until they die and then the lands reverted to crown control. It was a holdover from before Scotland became a unified country.

 **If it’s not too impolite, just how old are you?  
** I’m actually not sure. What I do know is that Selene was still around and she hadn’t met Endymion yet as I was already a Magi when the invasion that prevented her from being able to make him immortal started. But I’m not much older than that.

 **Why are you so unsure of your age?  
** You try living by at least 30 different calendars, not all of which mark time in the same way.

**Ed:The next question has been removed while the Journalist deals with the implications of the answer they received.**

**What is the most memorable moment of your time living in your homeland?  
** It would have to be spending a mortal lifetime fighting with Gilgamesh during the invasion I previously mentioned. He was already over a thousand years old at that point. He told me stories about Inanna and her high priestess Enheduanna, the birth of Ancient Egypt, and other wonders of the world that he had seen.

 **When did you become a Magi?  
** Do you mean when did I gain the title or when did I pass the trials that would grant it? The title, somewhere around what is now known as 30-50AD, I was the first to be granted the title when we formalised it. Pass the trials? I don’t remember it was so long ago.

 **Why did you become a Magi?  
** I was magical. You need to understand that in those times, the broad equality between men and women had already closed in the Greek states. There were three, I suppose you could call them genders, but that’s not an adequate term. Male, Female, and Magical. As soon as my magic manifested I was given the same education as a noble man, I was treated differently from everyone else, and the expectations on me were different too. As a city born magical I was expected to learn to defend the country, part of that was venturing out into the dream in search of power, knowledge, and the rare materials that were used by those that were magical enough to use them for potion making and making talismans, but not magical enough to defend themselves if they ventured into the dream. I think we called it the sleeping world, or the land of Hypnos as the only way to get there was during the time that everyone else was asleep. I pushed myself past the barrier between the 3 worlds and the rest of the dream, which as you know is no easy task. This allowed me to avoid working as a porter and messenger in the cities, as even then they’d discovered the glyphs to allow travel between the worlds that are the basis for travel in the school.

 **I suspect I could be here for days asking you questions and still only begin to scratch the surface of what you know. Skipping forward to this school. What was the idea behind it?  
** When the four founders found me, they wanted to build a place to just teach people magic. Don’t forget that while we were the first school for magic, we were far from the first place dedicated to teaching magic. Where their vision differed from the rest of the world was that they didn’t want to teach magic for a purpose, they wanted to teach everyone that came to their door the academics and magic that they’d need to know to be able to do anything they wanted to. That is something that all five of us have had to learn over time. It’s why the first two years of education teach so little magic, and focus on academics and combat with plenty of time for structured play. The children are learning what they need to learn magic later, while also learning to use their magic deliberately and with intent while they play.

 **Why did you teach combat?  
** Two reasons, self defence being the first one as outlaws weren’t as uncommon as you could have hoped. The second is that a healthy body promotes learning. Of course, there’s now a third reason. While we knew of a few practitioners in eastern Asia, none of us were proficient with body-based magic. Or Talisman Magic for that matter. Our current combat instructor comes from a society where pretty much everyone learns body based magic as a matter of course.

_Continued on page 10_


End file.
